194 7: Decision Th eory
experimental psychology, have been made since the late 1990s primarily through
experimental methodology. Recent work by de fi ne Licht (2014) is precisely in
this manner. Using a laboratory experiment, de fi ne Licht fi nds that when eval-
uating the legitimacy of a decision (acceptance), full transparency is not always
required as might be expected. Instead, when dealing with a more critical policy,
full disclosure of the process of making a decision is less useful than simply pro-
viding the rationale for certain decisions.
Rather than having public administration scholars continue to borrow from
other disciplines, which creates a lag in modifying existing theories, scholars
engaging in similar research methods will allow for public administration to
make a unique contribution. Although we are beginning to understand how
individuals are “predictably irrational,” little work has been done on how this
aff ects institutions or the act of governance. Th e fi eld of public administration is
well positioned to contribute to our understanding of how irrationality shapes
government decisionmaking. We agree with Simon that political science and
economics must continue to learn from each another; a bridge for such learn-
ing may in fact be a common methodology—experimental. Such an opportunity
also allows the discipline to be more visible to other fi elds, something that recent
empirical evidence suggests is sorely needed (Wright 2011).
Summary
We began the chapter by rehashing the debate between Waldo and Simon on the
issue of effi ciency and “value-neutral” decisions. In public organizations, what is
effi cient may in fact be defi ned in terms of both fairness and costs and benefi ts.
Understanding that what is fair is oft en socially defi ned, and that cost-benefi t cal-
culations are diffi cult to conceptualize owing to bias in information processing,
may help to resolve debates about what is “effi cient.” When it comes to decision
theory, the last twenty years of research indicate the fundamentals must change.
Th e “econs” (rational choice) versus “humans” (limited cognitive capacity) de-
bate originally discussed by Richard Th aler (2000) and later expanded by Th aler
and Cass Sunstein (2009) has clearly shift ed in favor of the “humans” approach
to decision theory. Research led by Th aler, Sunstein, and importantly Dan-
iel Kahneman (2011) has thoroughly and empirically demonstrated the extent
to which human beings (and thus bureaucrats and the organizations for which
they work) are subject to consistent and predictable biases. Humans’ fi rst assess-
ments of risk and probabilistic situations are oft en mathematically fl awed (see
Kahneman 2011). Th e focus among scholars now is how to design institutions
to allow for more effi cient decisionmaking that accounts for such biases and im-
perfections in decisionmaking. Th is approach falls under the rubric of “choice
architecture” (see Sunstein 2013; Th aler and Sunstein 2009; Jones 2001). Public
administration scholars have long debated the tenets of the logic of consequences
and logic of appropriateness discussed in this chapter, both of which are based